On the public record

Man. It’ll BE the future by the time I get this last piece up on the future of CA agriculture. But it is half-written and might get finished on my flight. Which means that it will wait for a few days until I get back to where I can post it. Mostly, I just want to say that I’m not abandoning the theme or the blog. Have a good weekend!

Farmers go broke and abandon land as they individually retreat from high fuel costs and scarce water. We can assume the marginal lands go first, unless mortgage decisions or loans for tractors turn out to be more important than soils or water. Individual growers bear the brunt of the pain. Land doesn’t get joined into wildlife refuges. Untended, the random parcels scattered among active farmland becomes banks for weeds and invasive species. Some of it becomes sprawl.

People confront high prices at the register in unmodified spikes, followed by gluts from other countries. Higher quality dairy products and organic produce aren’t supported, so a large market for those doesn’t develop. The cheap-food ethic continues and a race to the bottom in other countries strips their environment and feeds us instead of their own peoples. Besides that, though, California urban dwellers won’t notice very much. They’ll absorb what is left of California production and other regions will switch to truck crops and cattle to fill the rest of the country’s demand.

California meat and dairy will shrink as well. Internalizing the costs of confined-animal-feeding-operations will become too high. In the near future, dairies are facing the costs of controlling the nitrate they leak into groundwater, disposing of cow shit, rising costs of feed crops from climate irregularities, and building emissions controls. One or the combination of these will force them out of business. California raised meat will be in smaller herds on pasture, perhaps in the foothills of mountain ranges.

If the state defaults to augmenting built storage, pieces of environmental laws will yield, or become irrelevant when salmon and smelt are gone. Depending on how fast it all happens, there will be continued conflict within California about construction fixes. It’ll be a shame if the pointless ones get built, but continued rancor is another real cost.

Many islands in the Delta will go out of commission as levees fail. A few people will die in those floods. The west side of the San Joaquin will go out of commission from salt build-up, but not before becoming too toxic to recover as arid grasslands in decades. A few growers will kill themselves. Fuck if I know what’ll happen in Imperial or Coachella. I never pay attention to them. Since I’m guessing, I’ll predict that San Diego and LA will suck their water away. This leaves major ag production in the Sac Valley and the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, which is a decent place for it.

The people who will be hurt first and most will be agricultural laborers, mostly of Mexican descent. They already are. Their established communities and small towns will disintegrate. I do not know where they’ll go after they leave Great Valley agriculture. I assume it will be rough for them, as they are already poor.

This, for California, is not a vision of complete collapse. We’ll have enough water for some continued industrialized agriculture. The interior valleys will continue to be places people drive through. CA will produce less food overall and much less meat. Farms will consolidate further. Cities mostly won’t notice, except in food prices.

At Gristmill, Tom Lawasky relays a question from Fred Kirschenmann:

[L]et’s assume that ten years from now oil will be $300 a barrel, that we only have half the fresh water resources available that we have today for our food and agriculture system and that we have twice the severe weather events. What kind of agriculture should we be designing to put on the landscape that enables farmers to thrive, invites a new generation of farmers to enter farming and that restores the economic health of our rural communities?

Anyone care to take a shot at an answer? I’m all ears.

OK. I’ll take a shot at this. The thing is, he only gave the easy version. I want to pile on a little before I start, because there are other problems that he doesn’t mention. I think they also set the stage. This is only for California. I assume some of it transfers to industrialized agriculture more broadly, but I don’t know how other systems east of the Sierras work.

First:
The standard quote in CA is that the average age of a California grower is 57. No one knows where recruitment will come from. I overheard two lifelong ag guys comparing notes; their children laugh at the prospect of farming or an ag life. They were saddened. My understanding from reading the comments to the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Ag Vision process is that barriers to entry are very high when land and experience isn’t passed down through families. A grower warned us that land in the Sac Valley is consolidating under foreign firms at growers retire out; he warns that the foreign owners have no emotional ties to environmental stewardship here. (All of this is plausible hearsay to me. I can’t vouch better than that.)

I posit that people are leaving the sector because large conventional farms are horrible places to be (especially if they are very water-efficient). Hot, ugly, brutal, stripped of cover, sterile except for rows of identical plants. No one with economic choice would be there long. I think extant farmers acclimated to this slowly. But people who haven’t grown used to it don’t want to spend their lives in that.

Second:
Chemical inputs to farming are increasingly expensive.

Third:
There will be less water, but that’s just the beginning of it. We will also need places to put new larger floods, and we are eying historical sinks. That’s a fair amount of farmland to be occasionally inundated. I am starting to worry as much about capacity to apply water as the amount of water available. If you cannot put enough water on a field (because a district cannot keep all of its canals full in a heat wave when everyone takes water, or your equipment (looking at you, drip irrigation) is flow limited) a scorching two days can kill your crop. Doesn’t matter if you have enough water for the rest of the season in that case.

Fourth:
I did not need this, but we’re starting to hear from the plant physiologists. Too much carbon in the atmosphere inhibits nitrogen uptake, which means that plants don’t form proteins as well. I was like, so? Does that mean we switch to different crop varieties that have more protein in them, so I don’t starve to death before lunch? And the professor was like, yeah, that’ll matter for the eaters. It’ll matter more that plants won’t grow well, so yields will weaken. Frick.

Fifth:
There is bad news on the food safety front, but I don’t follow that much. I do know that growers have come to think of things like providing shelter to animals or re-using treated urban wastewater as posing an unacceptable risk of contamination from e. coli. A recall and popular fear of a crop can wipe them out in a year or two. That risk makes them unwilling to consider using their land for supplementary purposes, like habitat.

Those are the driving forces I see. To be fair, I suppose I should put up a list of positive drivers (although most likely I won’t get to it). That would be headed by the amazing ag science base we have here, the decent lead time, and potential from the state climate change plan. I’ll post an unplanned and a planned scenario today.

Friends, after a day of seminars by several researchers, I feel pretty comfortable telling you that we do not know what effects climate change will have on evapotranspiration. ET is the part of water that goes through the plant (transpiration) or evaporates off the plant surface or dirt. It is a huge part of the water balance, so if you are hoping to know how much water will be in rivers or in groundwater in a few decades, you’d sure like to be able to put a good number for ET into your model. The verdict was that several things will matter:

The growing season will be warmer, and therefore shorter, so crops might use less water from start to finish.
When CO₂ is readily available, plants do not need to open their stomata so much to take it in, so less water escapes. Transpiration goes down.
But it will be hotter, so plants will need more water.
If the growing season is short enough, growers might add a second or third crop into rotation, raising the amount of water needed for that acreage.

Basically we don’t know, and we definitely don’t know well enough to settle on a number to put in the big water models.

***

I have to say, after seeing presentation after presentation, my doubts about the usefulness of large scale models have returned. I do understand that you have to make assumptions to be able to do calculations, or that you dump all your unexplained phenomena into a closure term. But seeing them presented in model after model (because of course the researchers were ethical enough to present them) made me remember that they aren’t remotely close to real life. Then researchers agreed that they have to refine those terms. A part of me just thinks they should skip the model part and present their gut opinions. I think those might be just as good.

***

Finally, I got to hear a presentation about super high tech laser ET measurements. This guy! I saw these stories about fancy-dancy laser measurement of ET in the news a couple weeks ago. I didn’t pay it much mind. Hmmm, I thought. “It looks like another tool, like soil moisture probes. That could be useful, I suppose.” Then I moved on to contemplating lunch. But that was before I saw pictures, with neato telescope-looking gadgets that shoot lasers a couple kilometers to a receiver and then figure out the water content in the air by refraction or optics or physics or science or something. They can do a good job getting moisture in the air for the transect, but it is expensive to get your fancy-dancy lasers out to the field. BUT GET THIS!

They’re working on calibrating the transects from the lasers to satellite thermal imaging. The satellites come over every couple weeks and take pictures at 30m resolution, but the fancy-dancy lasers can refine that. If those can be calibrated, the Landsat images can cover a lot of ground and the fancy-dancy lasers can improve the resolution and then we’ll know everything about ET everywhere! It’ll be great!

I’m reading my January copy of the Natural Hazards Observer; if you aren’t subscribed to the Natural Hazards Observer, I don’t know why not. In a summary of the International Disaster and Risk conference 2008, the author wrote:

An anticipated outcome of the conference was to be “100 Ideas for Action” generated by the panels or from the experience of the assembled participants. The organizers did seek innovative ideas, but in this ambitious goal the meeting was not entirely successful. As acknowledged at the final session, many of the resulting videoed comments and even more of the solicited “new ideas” were conventional statements of positive intent.

Oh hell yes. This is all we get, all the time. Fucking platitudes. You feel like a grinch resenting statements of positive intent, but when you talk to bureaucrats you hear generic crap about working together and educating the public every single time. And they need more funding. Or, because it is our duty and our desire, we want to bring the public into our decision making. But in some ways, laypeople are the worst. They have just enough information to tell you the basics of your field. I swear, if you ask the broad public what to do in water, I guarantee you will hear one of two themes. If it is agriculture, you get the echoes of Cadillac Desert. If it is urban, you will hear that we should switch to pervious concrete. I’m not quite sure why pervious concrete has captured people’s attention so, but you can count on that recommendation. I love me some concrete, but that is not a new idea.

I’m not sure where to go for new thought. My friend suggests more demanding facilitation at meetings. I have to confess that I want to put a list of the platitudes that we always hear up on the wall, and if someone offers one, we point to it and cut him or her off. We know. Bigger pies, power of collaboration, efficiency, the children are our future. We know. But I am afraid that bureaucrats are so cowed they are afraid to say more than the platitudes that satisfied people last time. I read the comments to newspaper stories hoping that some crackpot will present such a skewed view that it will trigger something new. It is a pretty punishing search. I’ve said before that I’ve enjoyed the transcriptions of public comments for other processes. They aren’t dense, but there is some signal in that noise. I think my best sources for thought right now are the trade journals: Western Farm Press, the Journal of Light Construction, the Natural Hazard Observer or university presentations.*

My favorite recent thought came out of watching testimony to the Blue Ribbon Delta panel. That day, a county supervisor or city councilperson or someone stood up to say that it wasn’t the Delta that was broken, it was the rest of the state. Now that was an interesting prospect. The Delta in its current configuration, sinking peat islands behind shaky levees, is the priority. The remainder of California should act as a vassal state to support the farming lifestyles of a few thousand people farming in an untenable physical circumstance. The purpose of Silicon Valley and Hollywood is to accumulate money to hold back the rising seas in the Delta. I had never seen it like that before, but I got a lot of mileage out of that concept that day. It was way better than hearing another round of conventional statements of positive intent.

*I know you will die of jealousy –I am spending all day tomorrow at seminars on climate change and evapotranspiration. If I can, I will live-blog it for you. Now that is some riveting reading.